The Loved, and Lost

National Review Online

Monday, May 26, 2025

 

Abraham Lincoln called it the “altar of freedom,” and on that altar, for 250 years, the sacrifice has been levied in America’s young.

 

The killing and dying started at Lexington and Concord. It continued through Saratoga and Cowpens, Brooklyn and Yorktown. Next, it was New Orleans and Chapultepec, then Fredericksburg, Shiloh, and Cold Harbor.

 

Americans have fought for their country in, as the Marines say, “ev’ry clime and place, where we could take a gun.”

 

They fell along the muddy waters of Antietam Creek, the Meuse, the Mekong, and the Euphrates. American sweat and blood was shed climbing Missionary Ridge and San Juan Hill, the Apennines Mountains and Hill 861 in Vietnam. Americans are buried on every continent. Americans are buried in France, in the green hills of Korea, and in Tunisia on the North African coast. They died at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat Airport. They died at Kabul International.

 

The seas have not given up their dead.

 

What did it all mean? Was it worth it? Lincoln knew better than to argue specifics when he wrote to a Mrs. Bixby of Boston, when his country was adrift in a sea of blood. “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming,” our 16th president wrote to a mother who had lost her several sons in battle. “But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.”

 

Lincoln in his consolation and in his wisdom may have been reticent, but we can say, as did Pericles in his funeral oration for Athens’ war dead, that young Americans have always gone into battle because they, “judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valor,” will “never decline the dangers of war.”

 

For this principle, and for their country, Americans have fought and died, all too willingly, and for two and a half centuries. And yet we know that there was always something more than even that. “Greater love hath no man than this,” Jesus told us, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Indeed, the histories of our wars are full of the stories of American sons and American daughters laying down their lives for their friends.

 

It’s to these “loved and lost” — as Lincoln called them — that we dedicate this Memorial Day. It’s these young Americans that we remember. It’s to these young Americans that we owe so much, indeed, even our very liberty.

 

And with our greatest president we join in praying “that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish” of so many American families’ bereavement, in their thousands.

 

We pray that they are left “only the cherished memory of the loved and lost.” And “the solemn pride” that must be theirs to “have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”